Water leak cleanup at Lake Kennedy Center may take up to a week

January 14, 2013

Lake Center Senior Center may be closed for up to a week as cleanup from a weekend water leak continues.

A water valve burst sometime over the weekend, flooding the facility and forcing its closing for the near future.

Kitty Sayers, the senior center's supervisor, said a valve in the men's room under the sink burst. When it happened has not been determined.

"We had people using the building on Saturday and they were OK. I'm going to guess sometime Sunday," Sayers said. "We don't know how much damage was done because they're still looking around the building and evaluating it."

Sayers came in to work Monday and found the carpeting in the lobby totally saturated and several inches of water on the ground.

The fire department was called in while senior center workers got to work vacuuming the floors to get as much excess water out as possible until private contractors came in to begin the drying process.

"The water was still moving out after the fire department shut the water off," Sayers said. "The water was over your shoes."

Sayers said she didn't expect any programs to take place at the senior center for the rest of the week, but it depends on where the water has gone and the damages associated with it and the repair, and, of course, the drying out.

Sayers said this will result in an inconvenience to the seniors who use the facility.

"It will be a disruption. We hate to see this happen, but it does,' Sayers said. "We hope to get this cleaned up as quickly as we can and get back to a normal pattern."

A look outside the facility told the story: furniture stacked up outside the lobby, work trucks from Fireservice Disaster Kleenup set up nearby, and senior center workers going through items to determine if anything has been damaged beyond repair.

Inside, the loud rumbling of the Fireservice industrial fans can be heard, between 60 and 70 of them, and while much of the wood flooring was dry by noon Monday, there is also a lot of carpeting that needs to be dried out.

Chuck Lawrence, a supervisor at Fireservice Disaster Kleenup, said they have to remove the wood floor and extract the water from there.

"There's water trapped beneath a vapor barrier. It's going to be a couple-day process of drying everything out," Lawrence said. "We have to come back every day to check on the moisture. We'll probably be here all week."